Sunday, February 25, 2007

Tackling gun crime in South London and Hibs through to third Scottish Cup Semi Final for third successive year!!

I think that some useful initiatives will come out of the Gun Crime Summit last week at No. 10 and I will be glad to see the 5 year minimum sentence for gun position being applied to people from 17 year old and the speeding up of a new law to make replica guns illegal. I also support making gang membership an aggrivating factor in sentencing as I think that people carrying guns need to be clear what the consequences are likely to be if they are caught. They may sound draconian but we need to act now or further down the track we could be in a situation like Washington DC where young black men have a longer life expentancy on Death Row that they have being out in the street!! An extreme example I know but perhaps a vision of a future that none of us want to see?

The Southwark News lists the progress of the "100 days of Change" weekly and some of the "initiatives" look a bit lame. One of them was to "commit to improve Housing Repairs"! (is the current policy not to improve the Hosuing repairs Service?) and another one was that old gimmick of putting flags on dogs mess!!! (hands up for volunteers to do that?)
Does Cllr. Humphries really see this as a priority or is the whole project running out of steam and credibility? His next gimmick is to spend a few days on the Aylesbury but I have to ask if he needs to stay on every estate in the borough to work out what is going wrong with Southwark Housing??

Hibs won through in Dunfries beating Queen of the South 2-1 in what Manager John Collins called "winning ugly!". New boy Sunowmi scoring the winner. Hibs have a small squad and are looking at some short term deals to get them through the season. The loss of Caldwell, O'Conner , Riordan and Thompson in the past year has really put a serious dent in the squad and as well as bringing through the youngsters we do need a bit more experience.
Celtic scrapped through by scoring twice in the last 2 minutes so we have to wait until Thursday's Semi Final draw to see if we can avoid them in the Semi at Hampden!

I watched the Carling Cup and felt sorry for the Arsenal youngsters who played the best football but lost to a late goal and ended up in a full scale
brawl! I am a Red Card member of Arsenal due to one of my work offices facing directly onto Ashburton Grove and believe that Arsenal and Man U are playing by far the most attrative football in the Premiership this season.

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